By Amber Bradley, Editor-in-Chief, TalkLPnews
The lessons Dolly Parton taught us could probably fill up one of her magical Dollywood theme parks 10x over. As you doomscroll, there is no shortage of Dolly tributes, some rudely tied into veiled sales pitches, but most are heartfelt and thoughtful. Definitely super easy to do, given all Dolly lived for and proved throughout her incredible career. As I thought about what this week’s “My Take” should be, my mind kept coming back to Dolly, and what an incredible light we lost when she died. Digging in to some of her earlier interviews, I gravitated to one with one of my favorite journalists: Barbara Walters. If you have not seen it, give it ten minutes this weekend.
To be honest, I was a little dis with Walters on this one, and you can tell she is young and trying to make her mark in an almost bullying way. Walters goes in hard on Dolly on everything from her wig, to her boobs, to practically calling her a hillbilly. What’s incredible to me is the way Dolly handles her and the almost anger-inducing questions. Dolly is the picture of style and grace explaining her stance beautifully, never flinching. She does not go cold, she does not get defensive, and she never once matches the energy coming at her.
She tells Walters she knows people make fun of her, and that for years everybody assumed the joke was on her when it was actually running the other direction. She acknowledges her appearance is incredibly intentional because why “would she ever stoop so low as to be fashionable? That is the easiest thing in the world to do.” Dolly clarifies that she “can afford” to play around with her appearance because she’s secure in herself and her dreams, more importantly, the path she’s on to accomplish them. She knew precisely what game she was in and precisely what the costume was for. She had chosen that look on purpose, modeled on a woman from back home everybody else in the county wrote off as trash. While the audience was busy deciding she was silly, she was writing her own catalog and keeping her own publishing, including the time she said no to Elvis because his manager wanted half of “I Will Always Love You.” She called what she had horse sense: plain, unglamorous smarts, the kind that does not need a room to notice it.
That kind of security took me a lot longer than it took her. But I gotta say, once you decide that you’re ok with the jeers from folks only contemplating the surface rather than taking the time to assess the accomplishments, it’s freeing. Being underestimated only costs you something if you need the other person to change their mind about you. The day you stop needing it, the whole thing flips and starts working in your favor, which is the strategy Dolly ran for fifty years in a wig and five-inch heels.
Our profession runs on reading people fast. We size up a candidate in an interview, a subject in an interview room, a store team in twenty minutes on the floor. That speed is part of the job and I am not going to pretend it is not useful. It is also where we lose things. The applicant who does not present well and turns out to be the best investigator on the team. The manager whose paperwork is a disaster and whose store has never once had a bad audit. The person who dresses wrong for the room, talks too much, laughs too loud, and knows more about your shrink problem than anybody you have on payroll.
Walters had all the information she needed sitting in front of her and could not see past the hair. That happens in our business every week, and it is expensive in a way that never shows up in a report.
Dolly told her that night that her ultimate goal was to become a superstar so she could make as many people happy as she possibly could. Nobody watching in 1977 expected that answer from the woman they had already decided was a prissy, funny, extroverted Barbie doll they were laughing at. What’s more than her answer was the result. She accomplished everything she set out to do and to be, leaving behind innumerable accomplishments such as the Imagination Library, a mountain full of jobs in a county that badly needed them, and songs that will outlive all of us.
Next time you size somebody up in the first ten seconds, give it eleven or maybe even constantly consider your assumptions with each interaction. Barbara Walters sat three feet from a superstar and spent the interview talking about her hair.